medical device industry

Chinese companies are bringing exoskeleton robots beyond industrial and medical settings and into the consumer mainstream. The wearable robotic devices, which assist with walking, lifting and mobility, are being marketed to ordinary users rather than factories or hospitals, a shift that signals China's ambitions to lead in consumer-facing robotics as global interest in the technology grows.

A new legal analysis argues that regulators and companies must now navigate compliance challenges across food-as-medicine programmes, digital health tools and medical devices together, rather than separately. The piece highlights how nutrition-based interventions, apps and connected devices increasingly blur traditional boundaries between food, wellness and regulated healthcare, raising enforcement and oversight questions for providers, manufacturers and payers as these converging products expand.

Analysis in the medical device industry examines how regulators must adapt as AI moves beyond software and into surgical robots that physically operate on patients. The piece argues that existing approval frameworks, built for diagnostic tools and imaging, may not be suited to autonomous or semi-autonomous systems whose behaviour can change after deployment, raising questions about oversight, accountability and post-market monitoring.